New York|New York City Settles Wrongful Conviction Case in Brooklyn for $6.25 Million

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New York City Settles Wrongful Conviction Case in Brooklyn for $6.25 Million

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Jonathan Fleming after his release from prison last year. He served 24 years of a 25-years-to-life sentence for a murder conviction, which was overturned after new evidence was uncovered.CreditCreditMichael Appleton for The New York Times

Jonathan Fleming, who was cleared last year of a murder conviction after a decades-old phone receipt supporting an alibi emerged, has reached a $6.25 million settlement with New York City for years of imprisonment.

The agreement, reached on Tuesday with the office of the city comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, reflects that office’s strategy of trying to resolve wrongful-conviction cases before lawsuits are filed. Mr. Stringer, whose office announced the settlement, has reached similar resolutions with other wrongly convicted men recently.

Mr. Fleming was set free last year after spending 24 years of a 25-years-to-life sentence in prison. He had been convicted of killing a rival drug dealer in 1989 in Brooklyn, but had maintained he was in Florida at the time of the murder.

In 2013, a conviction-review unit at the office of the Brooklyn district attorney examined Mr. Fleming’s case. In the case file, investigators found a receipt showing that Mr. Fleming made a phone call at 9:27 p.m. in Orlando, five hours before the shooting at 2:15 the next morning, making it nearly impossible for him to have returned to Brooklyn to commit the crime.

In April of last year, a judge with State Supreme Court in Brooklyn vacated Mr. Fleming’s conviction. “Mr. Fleming spent nearly half of his life behind bars for a crime that evidence available at the time proved he could not have committed,” Mr. Stringer said in a statement.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: $6.25 Million Deal for Cleared Man. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe